1. Field Of Invention
This invention relates to kitchen knives, especially to kitchen knives for use in cutting or scoring produce rinds to facilitate easy peeling thereof and for performing a wide variety of other functions.
2. Description of Prior Art
Many, if not most consumers of oranges (or other citrus and easily-peelable produce) prefer to peel their oranges before eating them in order to make such oranges easy to eat since once an orange is peeled, it can be easily separated into its segments, which are bite sized.
Heretofore a wide variety of kitchen tools have been proposed and implimented for peeling oranges.
One such tool consisted of a knife blade with a parallel guard. Users peeled the orange by holding the knife's blade tangent to the surface of the orange so that the guard controlled the thickness of the rind as it was peeled. Users regarded this type of tool as unsatisfactory for peeling oranges because the depth of the cut determined by the guard rarely matched the thickness of the orange's rind, thus forcing a user to remove either less than the entire thickness of the rind, or the entire thickness of the rind plus some of the pulp, which being very juicy, made the entire operation very messy. In essence, users found this type of tool unsatisfactory because it did not peel the rind at its natural junction with the pulp, which is an easy place to effect a separation.
Another type of tool comprised a simple bent rod which users had to insert under the rind and move around under and parallel to the rind's surface so as to separate the rind from the pulp. However this type of tool required some skill or training on the part of its users. Also it did not separate the rind beyond a small portion on its area, so that users had to tear off the rind in irregular pieces and then rely on their fingernails to separate the parts of rind which this tool did not separate.
Most users, therefore, would find it desirable to have a tool which could cut and facilitate a separation of an orange's rind more easily.